How to drive a 2 well point 80'.

I would like to drive a 2' well point and don't want to call a well driller. I would appreciate any and all ideas and thoughts about how to drive a 2' well by hand, I've driven a 1-1/4' well point. please any thoughts and ideas. Al71

heres a deal i have been looking at.it can horizontal or vertical bore. uses a 1/2 inch drill and a garden hose. price seems reasonable if it works
borzit

how about a hydraulic post pounder and short joints....

I drove my 2" well with a 40 lb hammer from a rope and block above it and a driven drum bolted to my jacked up pickup wheel

I put mine (2") down 25' in pure sand. back in '89. I would look into what Glennster posted about down below with drill/water. Without some kind of aid (water) and rotation you are going to ruin todays 2" pipe and probably even the driver going that far.

Our local plumber has a drive adapter that goes on an electric jackhammer he rents from the hardware store.How deep you get just depends on what you hit.

That would work. To make any real time you will need a high enough flow of water to bring the soil and small gravel stone up and out on the ground.

I had a well drilled by a well driller 200 foot down with that type of deal. They had a high volume 2 inch pump sucking out of a horse tank with the water and soil back into the horse tank thru a tee. They had a short pipe drove into the ground below the tee with a three foot stand pipe above the tee. They used sections of one inch pipe with and end like your picture. Every 40 feet the stopped and put down two sections of well casing in the beginning.

dick, from what i read on their site it doesnt need much of a water flow to bore a hole, it just pushed the dirt into the sides of the hole, kind of "compresses" it. there is a pfd file on the link that shows how to set a sand point, or drill and install a well casing. i think it would be kinda handy to set a few wells in remote locations, then either drop a110v submersible pump, or use a jet pump, and run it off a small generator. be nice for filling a sprayer and such.

I've driven shallow wells by hand and using a pneumatic driver. You aren't going to drive a 2" pipe 80' deep for several reasons. One, the point isn't going to hold up being driven that deep. Two, even if it doesn't collapse, a hollow pipe isn't going to stay straight being driven that deep. It hits one rock or stone, its going to flex and the more that you drive in, at some point its going to cork screw and not get close to that. Another show stopped is the pipe will be significantly weakened on the tapered ends where its threaded, and the drive couplers will rip it apart under pressure. Something else, especially these days. If you buy your pipe from Menards, Home Depot, Lowes and most places, its going to be some very low grade, poor quality, cheap made in China garbage that will never withstand being driven probably deeper than 30' let alone 80'. And one thing about pneumatic drivers, they drive very fast, they truly do. Make sure to have your drive couplers very tight because even though they should cause the pipes to bind and tighten more, the vibration of the pneumatic driver has a tendency to loosen them up, causing suction loss and loss of prime. Been there, done that. Also, sometimes you will need to get water down around the newly driven well to establish a seal between the pipe and the dirt or you may not even be able to prime the well right off the get go. Getting water down along and around a pipe 80' deep might be some kind of task. Shallow well pumps typically won't draw very well beyond 25', and that includes the well head. It will tell you that right on the box.

It's up to you, but I'm pretty sure that if you try to "drive" a 2" pipe 80' deep, its going to be money and time wasted.

Good luck.

Mark

I really doubt you can drive it 80', would think 25-30 is pushing it.

If you think you have to go 80' how high do you expect the water table to be? If it's more than 25' down how will you get the water out? There are reasons why people hire well drillers and put in 4" and larger casings.

I know an old missionary fella that did his own bore. He used a 2" pipe and pushed it using the water forced down the pipe method. He even got it through a hard layer by making a sawtooth cuts on the bottom and screwing it left and right at the same time.
It worked for many years, but he did say that a limiting factor was that he couldn't have a non return valve at the bottom. If the prime was lost through a leak or anything it was difficult to prime. I can't remember the depth.
All the best with it.
Rx

When I was on our local Fire department we drove in 110 climbing poles at the lumberjack bowl using 1 1/2" pipes attached to a pumper. Those big poles sank right in and are still there today. I like the idea of the borzit and would think a pressure washer could provide enough ummph to sink a 2" pipe.

Let us know how it works out

Do they even make a submersible pump that will go in a 2" pipe? A sand point with a surface mounted pump can only draw water from 30 feet or less because that is all that air pressure can lift it. Back home on the farm our well was deep, but it had some kind of rod driven pump in it.

I tried to drill well by the barn with 2" pipe. I set it up using water pressure and screwed a metal "bit" on the end that I had made. It wasn't bad for the first two feet. The next 15 feet about killed me. The clay layer I hit at 17 feet stopped me dead in my tracks. I filled it in and ran new water lines from the main. Lesson learned.

Looks like they have reamers up to 7 1/2 inches, says you can set up to 6 inch pvc.

This was a 4 inch casing that we had put down. I was not able to be there watching a lot but it would need more dirt out of the hole to get the casing to slide down the hole. They used a yo yo rig to work the water jet up and down to loosen the dirt. This deal in your picture is Probly a different animal as to make it work.

Well Men there is a lesson learned here. If you don't know don't be afraid to ask. I can plainly see here that because of the hundreds of years of experience from all you that there is a tremendous amount of experience out there and don't be foolish and spend my time and money only to have it go to waste. I can understand why a experienced well driller wanted so much ($4000) to drill a well. I have great respect for all of you and willingness to respond with all of your responses. Thanks Al71

Years ago, my uncle and I drove an open pipe in for a few feet at a time and jacked it out again to clean the dirt out. I don't remember how far we went down, but when we hit water we put the point on for the final drive.

Why 80 feet deep? That's deep well territory. That gets bored and generally sleeved 4" with a submersed pump that then feeds a 2" well pipe. Yep, $4,000 is a lot of money, especially these days. Why 80 feet? Are you in the hills and that's where the water table is? I have a deep well feeding the house for water quality, but in reality where our deep well is, I would have had to go down probably 50 feet. Down in one of the barns though which is down a hill into a valley, I only had to go down probably 25' for the water table, although I went down 25' plus a 5' well head, 30 feet total...which is wrong. 25' is near max on a shallow well, but since I don't use it much. And for two years, I had a problem loosing prime until it finally sealed. That's what a pneumatic driver can cause if you're not careful. This is a 2" using a one horse pump and I had to use a tractor and load because of the weight of the driver. You figure a 5' section of pipe, drive couplers, and a section of pipe to be driven by the driver and beat to snot, to hoist a pneumatic driver up that high takes a lot of umph, hence tractor loader to lift it and set it on the pipe. Takes about 30 seconds to drive, but the vibration takes its toll and will loosen drive couplers that should actually twist and bind tighter and generally do. I've driven wells by hand as deep as 25', and that's work. Good for that is a once car axle welded to a 100 pound hunk of steel...the axle goes down inside of the pipe, and the whole thing gets lifted and dropped repeatedly on a drive couple that gets beat so bad it can never be used, but saves the pipe from getting beat up. Pulled a 1" well at about 10' plus the well head, replaced with a 1.5" at about 15' plus the well head, and about a decade later pulled it and replaced with a 2" at 20' plus the well head...and sold the house, down all by hand which is a lot of work. This 2" barn well at 25' plus a 5' well head? Pneumatic, but am sure it all twisted and angled off even at 30'. I can't imagine even trying 80', and the pipe that I originally bought from Menards is still setting in a corner of a barn waiting to get used for something someday...but not a well. I have to admit, that when I compared the wall thickness to the wall thickness of the pipe I ultimately used from a well supplier, the Menards was about half the thickness.

My best advice to anyone...learn from MY mistakes so you don't make the same ones.

Good luck.

Mark

I have washed a few down to about 25' using my 2" gas powered high pressure pump. I hooked the pipe to a 1.5" threaded pipe cut at an angle on the end. Went down 10 feet, added another piece, went down 10' added another piece.

I am currently driving a 2nd sand point at my cabin on the Cedar River. We have a building code here where we cannot have a sand point inside the basement of our homes.

I'm hand driving the well, trying for up to 20' or so. The pump must be up high, near the ceiling in the basement, because of flooding. My current pump has been under water at least 5 times!

A tough little job for this 72 year old!

Gunny, in Iowa